A. PURPOSE OF THE CORE AND SPECIFIC AIMS The goals of the CAPS Policy and Ethics Core are to assure that HIV research at CAPS meets the highest ethical standards, addresses important policy questions, and has a high impact on the policy making process. The core provides consultation to HIV scientists on how to resolve the ethical dilemmas that inevitably arise in HIV prevention and treatment research and on how to increase the policy impact of their research. Moreover, the core supports research on emerging policies such as routine testing and pre-exposure prophylaxis. Over the next project period, we will focus on addressing critical ethics and policy issues associated with our long-term goalssupporting research to reduce the number of new infections, improve health outcomes among HIV-infected individuals, and reduce HIV-related health disparities. This will include a focus on improving the implementation of evidence-based approaches to prevention and treatment and on evaluating the impact of policy changes, including changes to the HIV prevention and treatment landscape resulting from health care reform and development of the National HIV/AIDS Strategy.